Francesco Totti will be at the forefront for Roma against Manchester City in the Champions League. Photograph: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images

Francesco Totti had tears in his eyes as he lined up to face CSKA Moscow. The Champions League anthem had barely kicked in when television cameras picked out the Roma captain looking quite overcome. Three-and-a-half years removed from his last appearance in the competition, Totti had begun to wonder if he would ever get back here again. Never did he doubt that he belonged on such a stage. Totti turned 38 on Saturday, but remains as certain as ever of his own abilities. Asked on the eve of the CSKA game which teams in Europe would not want him in their starting XI, he replied: “Few of them”.

He showed why at the Stadio Olimpico, pulling the strings as Roma thrashed the Russian champions 5-1. Although overshadowed by a barnstorming performance from Gervinho, Totti had been excellent as his team’s central attacking pivot. His assist for the Ivorian’s second goal, a first-time chip to release his colleague down the right flank, was breathtaking for its vision and precision.

It was a pass Roma’s fans had seen him deploy countless times over the past two decades, teeing up team-mates from Gervinho all the way back to Abel Balbo. Players, managers and owners have come and gone in that time, but Totti remains the Eternal City’s great footballing constant.

Since making his debut at 16 he has played more than 700 times for Roma. His 235 league goals place him second on Serie A’s all-time scoring charts. Silvio Piola is still some way ahead, on 274, but Totti is adamant that he will stick around long enough to overtake the former Lazio forward.

Why would anyone doubt him? This is a person who had the strength of conviction as a 12-year-old to turn down a contract with Lazio because they were not the team he wanted to play for. A lifelong Roma supporter, Totti could not bring himself to betray the posters of Bruno Conti and Giuseppe Giannini that looked down from his bedroom walls. He sent his mother, Fiorella, to persuade Roma to sign him. As formidable off the pitch as her son turned out to be on it, she quickly made contact with Giannini’s father, Gildo, who was in charge of the club’s academy system.

“Lodigiani [the amateur youth side Totti had played for] had already promised him to Lazio,” Gildo told Il Messaggero some years later. “But Fiorella came and asked me to take him instead … I had to argue like crazy with the general manager of Lodigiani, but in the end Totti did come to Roma.”

The forward has remained there ever since, making his first senior appearance, against Brescia, on 28 March 1993, and staying so long that he now routinely plays alongside team-mates who were born after that match. How to explain such remarkable longevity? The slower pace of games in Italy is undoubtedly a factor. It is no accident that Paolo Maldini and Javier Zanetti were able to carry on in Serie A beyond their 40th birthdays. But it is also true that Totti, just like those players, has taken great care of his body as the years have passed.

His career seemed to be winding down at the start of this decade, his performances growing lethargic as Roma slumped to sixth and then seventh-place finishes. A section of the press turned against him, arguing that he had become a negative influence on the team. Totti did not take kindly to their criticisms, showing up to training in a T-shirt that read “Basta” [enough].

On some level, though, perhaps he knew he was struggling. It would certainly explain why he committed to a rigorous new diet in 2012. He lost 13lb over the summer, returning in the best shape he had been in for many years.

The effect on the pitch has been clear. Totti is slowing with age, but pace was never his primary weapon. It helps that the rest of the team is functioning so smoothly around him with Rudi García bringing stability to a club that had gone through five managers in three years.

It also helps that Totti has had the opportunity to work under so many excellent coaches, in so many different roles, over the course of his career. He thrived on the left of a three-man attack under Zdenek Zeman, won the league as a playmaker for Fabio Capello and then enjoyed his most prolific season as a false nine in Luciano Spalletti’s “strikerless” 4-6-0.

In his younger years, Totti was sometimes mocked by critics. There was an element of regional prejudice at work, northern Italians making fun of the player’s thick Roman dialect. But he was the first to admit that he never cared much for school. “If my parents had made me focus on [studying], as happened to lots of my friends, I would not be Totti today,” he told Gazzetta dello Sport in 1998. “Instead I would probably be one of the many unemployed people out there looking for their first job, scouring the classified ads to make the most of my diploma in accounting.”

But just because Totti had no interest in sitting behind a desk did not make him a slow learner. On the football pitch he was constantly taking lessons from his coaches and the exceptional cast of players he had around him at Roma.

“Balbo used to like to come to you, [Marco] Delvecchio went directly at goal, while [Gabriel] Batistuta wanted the ball put on him because he was physically strong,” he once recalled. “With [Vincenzo] Montella you could have a quick one-two. Every player had their characteristics and in that period I saw all their movements while playing behind them. That’s how I learned to be a true attacker.”

In Italy, nobody doubts that he has been one of the greatest of his generation. Last October, Gazzetta dello Sport went through the player ratings they award after each game. Crunching the numbers for the past 20 years, the newspaper found that Totti had a higher average score than any other individual. By this method, they identified him as Serie A’s best player in three separate seasons, most recently in 2012-13.

Yet he has never received quite the same recognition abroad. In 2006-07, when he scored 26 goals to win the European Golden Shoe, Totti finished 10th in the Ballon d’Or voting.

If even the correspondents of Gazzetta, a Milan-based newspaper, could see the truth, then why not observers from abroad? Perhaps it is because of Roma’s lack of success in Europe. Totti, and Roma, have never gone past the last eight of the Champions League. On the two occasions they reached that stage, in 2007 and 2008, they lost to Manchester United by a combined score of 11-3.

Totti believes he still has time to make amends for those disappointments. Having won the league title with Roma in 2001, then the World Cup with Italy in 2006, he views a Champions League winners’ medal as the one item missing from his collection.

Earning one will not be straightforward. Totti has acknowledged that Roma would do well just to get out of a group including Bayern Munich and Manchester City, who Roma meet on Tuesday at the Etihad. But he is not a man who easily lets go of his dreams. “I always say that the best is still to come,” he said this month. If so, then the next few years could be very special indeed.